It’s NaNoWriMo time again!

Good luck to everyone participating. I’m not. This isn’t some holier-than-thou statement. I just don’t have much time to dedicate to NaNothis year. However, I am running an experiment. I’m doing a NaNo’s worth of non-fiction writing. By most counts, I’m probably like 5,000 words behind my target, but whatever.

The content I create this month has incorporated many of the ideas required for a NaNo project. I have been planning out my articles. It helps to create a road map, and this is a new kind of project for me. I’ve never tried to generate articles or non-fiction like this before.

Everything I create is going to end up as an article on this site. Earlier in the year, I’d set a goal for myself to see if I could average a visitors day, and create content for an entire year; essentially, 52 posts from January to February. My NaNo experiment is a means to finalize content for the remainder of the year.

So far, I’ve prepared about 1500 words. That means that I am far behind my target. A couple of paragraphs up, I said about 5,000 words. In order to keep up with NaNo’s pace, it requires something like 1700 words a day to maintain a word count that will complete the project. After six days, which is when I was writing this article, I should have about 10,200 words. That means that with the 1500 words I have written I’m behind approximately 8700.

Since I aim for my articles to be about 500 words each, give or take, then I’m behind by about 17(!) articles. Clearly, I have some catching up to do. Will I be able to do it? No idea. At the end of the day, I just wanted to try and keep pace, but not write a novel.

I would love to write an entire book of non-fiction, and this is an initial foray into seeing that project become reality. Gaming as a hobby has had a relatively short history, all things considered. There have been countless articles about the hobby, and all of it combined feels as if it were only just scratching the surface. My NaNo experiment will build on all of that, and take its place among all those other voices.